Suggestions by Tobias Ellwood, chairman of Parliament’s Defence Committee, that the West needs to “re-engage” with the Taliban are “unrealistic and misguided”, an exiled Afghanistan leader has said.
After returning from a visit to the country, Mr Ellwood this week uploaded a video and published an opinion piece in which he claimed the Islamic fundamentalist group was providing security and economic opportunity, and called for the reopening the British Embassy in Kabul.
His remarks were controversial given the Taliban has faced criticism since returning to power in August 2021 over human rights violations, especially with respect to its treatment of women, with girls currently banned from attending schools in the country.
Khalid Noor, who represented the Republic of Afghanistan in the ultimately failed peace talks with the Taliban prior to the 2021 regime change, said: “We hold Mr Ellwood in the highest regard but in our view his assessment of the current situation in Afghanistan does not give the real picture of the nation.
“How can you if you spend a day or two in one province and a short time in the capital?
“To conclude all of Afghanistan is safe and prosperous from a visit to the part of the country where the Taliban was born, where it enjoys its greatest public support, is as mistaken as saying Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a success after speaking to loyalists around his birthplace in Tikrit.”
Mr Noor continued: “For example, Mr Ellwood judged the Taliban as stopping the export of opium because he witnessed a curated event at a former opium farm where the crop had been destroyed.
“What about the opium pipeline from southern Afghanistan across the border into Pakistan, via the provincial capital of Quetta and the port city of Karachi?
“There is no evidence that pipeline has been switched off or even reduced.”
Like many Afghan opposition figures, Mr Noor, a member of the National Resistance Council for the Salvation of Afghanistan (NRCSA), was forced to flee Afghanistan after the return of the Taliban, and now lives in Dubai.
Taking issue with Mr Ellwood’s belief that the people of Afghanistan were willing to trade a loss of human rights under an autocracy for an improvement in stability, he added: “All over the world that same argument has been wrongly made for decades – stability trumps everything, the international community tolerating poor governance as long as it is stable governance.
“That same argument gave the world Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo, Ceausescu in Romania, Noriega in Panama, the South Vietnamese regime in what was then Saigon, and so on.
“So the lesson of history has to be that stability today comes at a terrible price tomorrow.
“To re-engage with the Taliban would to be allow a problem to fester, maybe even for decades.
“Now is not the time to send the signal that coercion works.
“Mr Ellwood’s assessment is unrealistic and misguided.”
Writing in today’s Daily Telegraph, Mr Ellwood said: “If the West continues to sulk we could be making another blunder which pushes the nation to a fiscal cliff, potentially igniting another cycle of instability, terrorism and mass migration.
“A more pragmatic strategy is necessary. The Taliban’s restrictions on women’s rights may well serve as a negotiation tool for shared understanding.
“But such a possibility will remain unknown until we wake up. The first step is reopening our embassy.
He added: “The second is to get real. Afghanistan’s future could be war again or life as a Chinese vassal.
“The middle way I saw – however queasy we feel about it – needs us to rethink and re-engage.”
